Tag: art rock
-
Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Twelve minutes is a respectable length for an EP, but with eight tunes on this disc they’re still pretty much crammed in, none of them clocking in closer to two minutes than one-and-a-half. If you think that makes this sound like a sampler, you’d be very wrong: although these bands…
-
Karda Estra – Mondo Profondo/ New Worlds (avant-prog)
It’s far from unusual for me to beaten to the scoop on the music I’m sent to review, for various reasons, but not least because I like to spend a good deal of quality listening time trying to get inside the music before I set dactyls to chiclets and start…
-
Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A combination of electro-acoustic and programmed sounds are used here to create a sound that pays clear homage to African polyrhythmic percussion music, unpitched attacks mingling with sounds similar to idiophones or lamellophones, although they might come from almost any source. Then there are the synths, guitars and lo-fi samples……
-
Tom Slatter – Three Rows Of Teeth (avant-prog)
Tom Slatter likes steampunk; he likes it enough to have used it as the thematic touchstone for all three of his albums to date. Now steampunk is not a musical style (Abney Park notwithstanding) but a genre of fiction, and a large body of visual culture derived from it. If…
-
Buke And Gase – General Dome (indie rock)
Buke And Gase armour themselves in symbols; the inquisitive listener’s eye, probing the album’s packaging for keys to the music’s meanings may find some affective affinities between its appearance and the sound (that’s a matter for their own aesthetic conscience), but its gaze will be reflected, denied admission by the…
-
Thumpermonkey – Sleep Furiously (progressive rock)
Injunctions to sleep in a particular manner crop up from time to time as album titles. Hope & Social’s last album length release was called Sleep Sound, which is perhaps the kind of sleeping to which most of us are accustomed; either that or badly. Furiously is another matter altogether:…
-
Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Schoolday nostalgia seems to be a current in many branches of music nowadays. It’s by no means a new thing, but it’s definitely growing. It’s curious how it lends historicity and distance to times that probably don’t seem at all distant to a greybeard like me; my theory is that…
-
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – Lost And Found (anti-folk/ art-pop)
Hot zowee! This long player is really a gas, boys and girls! If the family that plays together stays together, then The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are one fantabulous bundle of cosmic togetherness: these three way-out cats are as groovy as a corduroy overcoat and as hip as a coxa…
-
Sissters – There’s A Party In My Mouth But You’re Not Invited (post-punk/ noise rock/ art-punk)
The word experimental is over-used in descriptions of avant-garde music, and is not always meaningful: who are we as listeners to judge whether an artist is conducting an experiment, or whether the sounds we hear represent their mature practice? However, experimental or not, There’s A Party In My Mouth And…
Oliver Arditi 